Making bookmarks is one of my favorite things to do. The bookmarks we will be making are going to be two inches wide by eight inches high. This size works well when printing on an 8½ by 11 inch piece of paper, as you can place five bookmarks on the sheet for printing. This leaves sufficient margins around the edge of the paper, which is necessary for most desktop printers as they do not print to the edges of the sheet.

When choosing your photograph remember that you will be cropping an area that is short and long or tall and narrow, since photographs do not usually come two by eight inches. The photograph I am choosing to use for this project is one I took of a group of turtles that had climbed onto a fallen log on a pond. Since my photograph is much larger than two by eight so I am going to crop the photo down to size.

As you can see in the image, using the Rectangular Marquee Tool in Photoshop, I have outlined a rectangle that is the size my bookmark. Now I can move that rectangle around my image until it surrounds the part of the photo with the turtles in it. The photograph opened up originally as 42 inches wide, so I reduced it to ten inches wide therefore allowing me to select all the turtles within my eight inch limit.

Once you select the part of your photograph you want to use, crop your image. If you image is horizontal you will then want to rotate it 90° so that it is vertical. This way it will import into the columns of your layout program in the right direction.

Digital photographs come in RGB Color mode. As most desktop printers, inkjet or color laser, use the CYMK Color mode, you will want to change this for the best color printout of your bookmarks. Save your image using Save As so that your original photo remains untouched.

Now we are going to set up five bookmarks on the page for printing. Using the layout program you normally use, setup your page as Landscape, quarter inch margins top and bottom and half inch margins left and right. Setup your page to have five columns with no space between them, giving you two inch columns. Once your file is setup, import your bookmark image and place it in the first column. Copy the image and paste it four times, one for each of the remaining columns. You could also just print one or make up to five different bookmarks using different photographs.

The image shows the five bookmarks setup on the page in Word. Word has left a thin white line between the bookmarks giving you a cutting guide so that you don't need to setup crop marks. Normally you would setup crop marks so that you would know where to cut between the bookmarks. Because these bookmarks are two inches wide, cutting becomes easy to do without crop marks -- cut off the margins and then cut every two inches.

Some options for your bookmarks could be printing on the reverse side a personal message or your company information and use them as promotional items, using photo paper to enhance your photograph, or laminating to protect and keep your bookmarks looking great for a long time to come.